BreakPoint
This is Hooovahh
One of my customers, a BIG company, had 0 alcohol policy.
Of course when management arranged a huge pretentious event (the king and queen came), management arranged for alcoholic drinks.
I heard (I wasn't invited) the safety officers where able to prevent it.
Search LabVIEW like a graph! 
We have the strictest policies that we follow all the time. Until it isn't convenient, then we ignore them.
For a while management got a budget to take people out to lunch with. My boss took people to the bar occasionally, and they would occasionally order an alcoholic drink. He went up to finance to submit the receipts for reimbursement and they said out loud "You can't expense alcohol." My boss looked over to HR that was sitting next to him and HR said "Sure you can." So finance approved it. My boss knew that the HR department recently had gone to a bar for a lunch outing, so he knew it would be fine. And again to be clear I've never seen anyone order a second alcoholic drink at lunch.
@Hooovahh wrote:
I’ve ordered drinks by color at a ton of bars over the years. I call it drinking the rainbow. Never have I made it that far into the rainbow as I did that night.
Just get a glass of milk. It contains all colors of the rainbow at once. 😄
(of course Ouzo + water would work too!)
@altenbach wrote:
@Hooovahh wrote:
I’ve ordered drinks by color at a ton of bars over the years. I call it drinking the rainbow. Never have I made it that far into the rainbow as I did that night.
Just get a glass of milk. It contains all colors of the rainbow at once. 😄
Of course, if the colors mix subtractive, you'd have to order a dropshot (Dutch liquorish liquor).
Or black absinthe (the liquor, not the band). Absinthe is an acquired taste, probably best not to acquire a taste for it though. I heard at some point it was the most popular liquor in the world (IIRC 1840-1880?).
The art related to Absinthe is amazing (Absinthe Fairy (pinterest.com)).
Revolutionary Battery Technology
(Not my story but a coworker) An external customer of ours wanted to partner with us to look into designing a new battery. It was a lead acid battery and it was expected to perform really well for longevity. Typical batteries could go through 100 cycles of our testing before they would die. After a bunch of design and engineering work we had a prototype to test with and were hoping for at least that much. We got the battery and gave it to a technician to run the test with and do periodic reporting. After some time we passed 100 cycles of testing and the battery seemed to perform well so we kept going to see how long it would last. It made it to 200 cycles and everyone started celebrating, we thought we had a new breakthrough in battery technology. Management started reaching out to potential customers and bragging about our new secret designs. The company was excited and there was lots of buzz around the performance, but we kept testing. We hit 300 cycles, then 400 cycles. At some point engineering started to get suspicions that the performance was too good and it should have died by now. So they started talking to the technician running the test.
Apparently, without being told by anyone, the technician was adding deionized water to the battery every night. It was meant to be a sealed battery in production but the prototype had port access on the top and he just decided to do daily maintenance to the battery, which completely invalidated the testing we’d gone through. The wind was taken out of the sail, and we had to start testing all over on a new prototype battery. The real test lasted 80 cycles. So what happened to this guy? Was he fired? No, the whole company fell apart, they went out of business and everyone lost their jobs. I don’t know how much was due to over-promising and under-delivering, but this incident probably didn’t help. One day before the announcement of layoffs, the boss was at his desk and said “Have you ever reached the bottom of the LinkedIn suggestions page before?” Which was a bad sign.
Someone I don’t know, but have seen in the office came up to me and asked if I can help them. I said sure.
He said: Can you help me with a sticker?
Me: What kind of sticker?
Him: I want a sticker with my name on it.
Me: You want me to write your name on a sticker?
Him: No, I need a sticker that has my name printed on it.
Me: Where is this sticker going?
Him: I want to put it on something.
Me: What’s this for? Is this asset tracking?
Him: Yes.
Me: I don’t have access to the asset tracking system, and I don’t make labels for it.
Him: You can’t print me a sticker?
Me: I don’t have a printer, but even if I did I don’t have the barcode format or database for issuing new equipment labels.
Him: Well who does?
Me: Someone in the asset tracking department like <Name>. You should talk to them.
To be clear, I work as a software engineer in testing. And the asset tracking labels we make, don’t have someone's name on it. That would defeat the purpose of a tracking system since equipment can be checked in or out to people. I found the conversation comical because it was so hard to get the information I needed to help.
We are just lazy
Email: Here’s a really dumb idea that shows we haven’t thought through the process at all and are just asking you to do extra work, so that we don’t have to do our job. Do you think you can do this?
Here is a 500 word reply explaining that we’ve thought through all of this before and how it is a terrible idea, and won’t actually fix the issue you are seeing.
No one can leave
This one isn’t mine, but a friend of mine. He works at a place that is broken up into many different groups in the same division. Sometimes jobs open up at other groups, and the job will be posted internally as a job anyone can apply for. However there is a policy that once you accept the new position, you must work at your old group for two weeks, and then continue working there, until the manager of the group is willing to let you go. The idea is this is supposed to give managers time to find replacements for people that are vital to the way the group works. But in reality, this just encourages people to quit, rather than move to another group. Because of this policy managers tend to not even start seriously looking to replace someone, until 2 weeks after they are asked to leave. Projects just keep going the way they were, and the employee that is trying to leave will continue to get new work, and still reports to the old boss. On the flip side of this, the manager of the new group has essentially hired someone, and has no idea when they will actually be ready to start doing the work they need to.
But even after all of this, if you do move to another group your work in the old one never ends. I was told about projects that someone worked on and then moved to another group, and even multiple years later they are asked to work on the project when they aren’t busy.
